Sharp Fashion

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1. Proactive Strategies

Generally, a proactive firm initiates changes and does preemptive R&D and product development and to preempt undesirable future events and achieve goals.

Which the strategies base on 3 sources, the first one Research and development, a company can be proactive in identifying customer needs and developing products via market research, customer interviews etc. The second one Entrepreneurial, an entrepreneur has an idea and makes it happen by building venture enthusiasm and allocating resources. The third one Acquisition and alliance, a type of proactive strategy for growth and financial success.

1. In this case, there are several point of success that can be found:

• Satisfy customer needs, growing trend towards unique, personalized products, Sharp designed to design a calculators which were not functional but could also be used as “fashion” accessories. A new product that can deliver required benefits to customers at a price which provides high value.
• Innovation, competition in the market for pocket calculators had driven prices so low that the retail price of full-features, small-size calculator knew as the trend for the existing market, so there is a highly innovative product concept could increase market share. Technology superior to fill gaps in markets and deliver values.
• Screen on growth potential, favorable competitive environment, and fit to company strengths, Sharp have experience in doing the professional electronic calculators and continued to lead the calculator field with smaller, lighter products.
• Identify market with profit potential and unfilled, and the company has the capability and resource to enter. In mid-1980’s, calculator product saturated in market, Sharp need to develop a series of calculator that would differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack and bring in new customer. In the meantime, the growing trend towards to personal electric accessories, so Sharp designed to go head for the pocket calculator with support of Design / Engineering / Manufacturing department.
• Fast cycle time, only take 10 month to launch the product to market including 50-60 days in Design. Short time-to-market could result in better market performance, particularly in industries with fast technological changes such as computer chips and software since delay would lead to loss of competitive position.
• Well co-operation inside the company, the capabilities of the companies does match the requirements for developing, producing and marketing the new product. Although this project just have about 1 year market life, but this project had a long-term beneficial impact for Sharp, raising the design consciousness if both employees and its customers.

1. To choose an appropriate strategy, it is essential that companies understand the situations affecting the decision. These include growth opportunity, protection for innovation, scale of the market, the strength of competition, the organization’s position in the product system. According to Ansoff‟s Matrix, this is a “Product Development” segment, producing new products for existing markets. Normally, both reactive and proactive strategies can be considered. For reactive phase, Second-but-better Strategy and the Responsive Strategy can be applied on it, as the market already got a pocket size calculator and Sharp have experienced in doing the electric product, some marketing research and customer need can be found easily and point to the weakness for those existing item in open market In Proactive phase, Sharp’s company organization including large Marketing / R&D / Manufacturing which are well coordinate in order to lead the success in product development.

There are some concerns on the new development product. The forecast quantity, it is not easy to estimate the sell through for the new product especially the “fashion” rapid change in the market, it will cause lot of stock and liability in manufacturing. Besides, too rush in development will cause non-stable in production and the quality of product which make lower customer satisfaction. On the other hands, the passage mentioned it is difficult to produce / manufacturing which will cause high defective rate as a result more costly and lower profit margin.  

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